Sunday night was the closing night of the Lollapalooza tour this summer, and Pearl Jam was one of the bands performing. As Eddie Vedder has been known to do, he used the venue to get a few political shots in - asking the audience to work for peace in the middle east, inviting a veteran who was injured in the Iraq war on stage, and adding the line "George Bush, leave this world alone" and "George Bush, find yourself another home" (both sung to the tune of "Another Brick in the Wall" to one of the songs they performed that night.
What happened next, though, is something that the band says shows just how important
net neutrality is. Net neutrality is the idea that there should be regulations enacted to prohibit broadband providers from deciding who and what can be transmitted over their lines. Without net neutrality, if a company doesn't like what a website says, it can prevent it's users from being able to access that site. Or if a politically-minded rock star decides it's important to make a statement of protest against a bad president and an ill-conceived war, a company who doesn't like that message can have the signal drop out (accidentally, of course) when those comments are being made...
But if you were at home listening to the show on the Webcast being provided by AT&T, you would have missed those lines. As the band writes on its site, the Web transmission cut out the protest lines. AT&T says its monitor did so by mistake -- what a strangely precise and politically convenient mistake!
In a press release, Gigi Sohn, the president of the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, says:
How can we trust a company that promises not to interfere with content on the Internet when it has its corporate finger on the button to cut off political criticisms it doesn't like? The admitted censoring of a Pearl Jam performance is just one more reason why content should be protected against the actions of a company looking out for itself, rather than for consumers and the free flow of information over the Internet.... We hope the FCC and Congress take note.
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